When the San Joaquin Literary Association moved poet Danez Smith’s March 2020 reading at Fresno State from in-person to online, as a precaution to the developing news around Covid-19, none of us knew that within a matter of weeks we’d be starting a months-long nationwide lockdown due to our government’s mismanagement of a global pandemic, or that George Floyd would be murdered by the Minneapolis police in Smith’s home state, which sparked the largest surge of direct action we have seen since the Civil Rights Movement.
Since Smith’s reading, there have been over 2,000 Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations across the United States, and despite the lack of media coverage, they are still happening. Only thirteen cities so far have defunded their police forces, but monuments of racist icons are being taken off their pedestals and drowned in rivers. Activists in Louisville, Kentucky who continually demand the prosecution of Breonna Taylor’s murderers – Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, Ofc. Brett Hankison, Ofc. Myles Cosgrove – successfully pressured the federal government to reopen Taylor’s case. But in Portland, Oregon, activists are being kidnapped off the street by federal officers in unmarked vans. In Brooklyn, New York, over 15,000 people rallied in support of Black Trans Lives Matter, but the list of Black trans people and trans people of color who have been murdered has now reached twenty-nine. And every day, the number of Covid-19 related deaths grows. We don’t know what the future will look like, but the privilege some of us have carried our whole lives that allowed us to consider the past as “normal” has been revoked.
So, during this time when Black and brown people are positioned, yet again, to defend our humanity, I want to revisit Danez Smith’s reading at Fresno State and the powerful poetic perspective of their latest collection, Homie. It is a perspective resonant of what James Baldwin articulated in 1955 about how to transcend our social categories through the literary imagination: “… our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.” Homie is the literature of acceptance. It is here to remind us that although there is much work to be done, we have nothing left to prove. This is the kind grace the poems gather us in from the start of the collection:
friends! if i may interrupt right quick
i know y’all working, busy smoking & busy
trying to not, busy with the kids & moms
& busy with alone, but I have just seen
two boys– yes, black– on bikes– also black–
basketball shorts & they out side shoes, wild laughing…
As a Black, queer, poz poet, Smith is not concerned with asserting a vision of a new world that includes them; they are reporting from the one that already exists in the margins. Smith is writing from the margins, not about them, centering on all the things that are often denied, like love, tenderness, pain, friendship, and most importantly, joy. But there is no way around it, as Smith says when speaking about their process for self-care after writing about Black trauma:
Homie also offers our literary imagination a kind of poetics that possesses the capacity to reflect and shape our queer, complex identities into language. One moment Smith writes a poem that is equally as tender as it is raunchy, like “All the Good Dick Lives in Brooklyn,” a poem that asks, “where do they keep the good shit in your town? / that fair-trade nana, them gushy gushy schools?” Meanwhile, in “On Faggot,” Smith reclaims the homophobic slur by occupying its origin’s fear: “the word faggot. means different. any boy-shaped. child who behaves a way. someone else’s tenderness.” Smith writes to the deep desire to feel alive and connected while simultaneously being policed and othered, which is why throughout the collection there are phrases borrowed from their friends and entire poems built around conversations with family, like the poem “Waiting On You to Die So I Can Be Myself.”
Homie includes a poem made up of readers’ stories shared on Facebook, and persona poems and rap lyrics and TV references and pop culture—everything of the imagination belongs. It’s through this acceptance that Homie was born because Smith leaned into the things that interested them.
Smith urges writers to trust the process, even when we’re stuck, describing how some poems we have to write through while other poems may just be “bay leaf poems”:
Although we are in uncertain and unprecedented times, we have to keep looking toward the future. Art will pave the way. From Smith, we can expect, as they described, something “nerdy and with hips”:
Author’s note: Some of the events mentioned have further developed, as this essay went to publication in late October. The police officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s murder were only charged for “wanton endangerment,” and Breonna’s death was never mentioned in the case presented to a grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky. Thirty-one transgender people have been murdered this year, marking 2020 the deadliest year for transgender people. There has now been over 215,000 Covid-19 related deaths.
DANEZ SMITH is a Black, queer, poz writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. They also wrote [insert boy] (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of Fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez’s work has been featured widely, appearing on platforms such as Buzzfeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez’s third collection, Homie, was published by Graywolf Press in January 2020.
Angel Gonzales is a trans writer from Fresno, California. She holds a bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine and is currently a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Fresno State. Her work and interviews have been published on Poets.org, The Normal School, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She won the Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize in 2018. Her interview with the poet torrin a. greathouse is forthcoming.
Photo: Tabia Yapp/Beotis Creative.